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Nile Cruise: Cancellation
In mid-March I announced on the blog that I would be doing a cruise on the Nile (and seeing other interesting parts of Egypt) later in the year. I am sorry to say that because of the situation in the Middle East, we have decided to cancel the trip. Or rather, cosmic forces willing, to postpone it. I very much want to do it … sometime down the road when potential travellers will be more inclined to go to the region. BUT, I will be doing another trip in its place. To the Caribbean. Whoa. It’ll be a good one. I’ll give the details in my next post. For now, the Nile cruise has been canceled.
May 1, 2026
The Morality of War
I announced on Friday that we have cancelled (or at least postponed) the Nile-cruise trip I was planning to make with Thalassa Journeys, because of the ongoing situation in the Middle East. Here I’ll say a word indirectly about the conflict. As you may have noticed, I have a resolute policy not to discuss politics on the blog. I have always wanted the blog to be politically-neutral, so that people of all persuasions on governmental policy and action, social agenda, particular elected and appointed officials, and so on can benefit from the knowledge scholars (who are also of various persuasions) have acquired in studying the Jewish and Christian Scriptures, the history of early Christianity, and the many related topics connected with religion in antiquity. And so I will not be commenting or giving my views about the war with Iran and related conflicts. BUT, I thought it would be useful to say something factual about armed conflict from an ancient historical perspective. This is something I talk about in my recent book Love Thy Stranger, […]
May 2, 2026
Sailing Cruise to Caribbean Islands in January. Want to Come with Me?
I was so very sorry to announce that we will not be able to do the Cruise on the Nile we had planned for the fall, but Thalassa Journeys has now come up with an alternative that is, well — how many ways can you say “spectacular?” It is a cruise on a sailing vessel to some of the most gorgeous islands of the Caribbean, January 25-February 1, 2027. The ship, the Sea Cloud Spirit is amazing (just look it up): 136 passengers (our group will be a part of that), small enough to get into remote places the big cruisers cannot, and large enough to be, well, rather luxurious. There will be great sites, great vistas, fantastic food and drink, and friendly like-minded people in our group who will have intriguing stories and lives, and common interests to discuss to our hearts’ content. I will be giving lectures on the cruise on one of my all-time favorite topics: “The Greatest Manuscript Discoveries of Modern Times.” Here I will talk about archaeological finds that have revolutionized […]
May 3, 2026
Want To Be Involved in More In-Depth Discussion of Key Issues? A Blog Opportunity
Are you interested in going beyond reading blog posts on topics connected with the New Testament/early Christianity and in having a chance to interact with other blog members (and a New Testament scholar) on important and interesting topics or biblical passages? It is an option on the blog. It involves joining a special group called the “Blog Stewards.” We meet once a quarter for a focused seminar. In advance I pick a topic or important passage of the NT; I write up directions for how one might go about studying it; and I explain some of the lesser known background. Then we get together remotely for an hour and a half and discuss it all. No one is required to do the “homework.” Some members just want to sit and listen in while others talk. Others want to bounce their ideas around. I run it as a seminar,
May 6, 2026
Jesus and Capitalism: My Next Book (A Big Change)
For over a year now I’ve been thinking and saying my next book would be on the formation of the New Testament canon — how we got these 27 books and not others. I definitely am going to write that book, but something else has come up that is going to occupy my time, brain, and research first. My publisher, now that Love They Stranger is out, has asked me to consider writing a book about Jesus and capitalism (and socialism and marxism etc.). At first I was hesitant. I’m obviously not an economist. And there are plenty of books like that (look them up online). BUT, not so much by New Testament scholars approaching the issue the way I would. So I’m gonna do it. Books like this take shape over time. I never know exactly where my research will take me or what I will turn up that is hugely interesting but that I never thought about much before. (Did you ever see that old Daffy Duck cartoon
May 7, 2026
Converting the World: Why Has Christianity Always Been “Missionary”?
I just now got off the phone with a reporter for the London newspaper the Independent who is writing an article on new developments in our understanding of why Christianity spread so widely in the Roman world. (The Independent is one of the few newspapers anymore that has some articles of substance in addition to the exciting and/or depressing news of the day, given with a decided slant.) He wanted to know what new information, archaeological finds, and or analyses have appeared over the past seven or eight years and I had to tell him that, well, I didn’t know of any. (!) He was surprised, but suggested a few things he had come across (“Christians had better health care/community support” etc), and I had to inform him those were old ideas. Not wanting to go away empty-handed, he asked me my views about the question, Why did Christianity take over the Roman world? He knew I had written a book on it, but he hadn’t read it, so I went into my standard spiel […]
May 9, 2026
How Early Christians Made Converts. (Tent revivals?)
Did Christians hold massive evangelistic rallies? Is that how they converted the Roman world? Did they send out hundreds of missionaries to go door-to-door with their good news? Maybe use TikTok? Here I pick up on the question of how Christianity spread in the early centuries, from my previous post, with an excerpt again from Triumph of Christianity (Simon & Schuster, 2018). ****************************** Christians then, starting at least with Paul, came to be missionary, convinced they had to convert the world. Goodman maintains it was Paul himself who came up with the idea. He was the innovator, “the single apostle who invented the whole idea of a systematic conversion of the world, area by geographical area.”[1] At the same time, this is what makes it so striking and unexpected that outside of Paul’s work itself, we do not know of any organized Christian missionary work – not just for the first century, but for any century prior to the conversion of most of the Empire. As MacMullen has succinctly put it: “After Saint […]
May 10, 2026
Some Important Readers’ Questions on Some Gospel Head-Scratchers
QUESTION: If the strongest explanation for Luke’s alteration/omission of the centurion’s declaration that Jesus was the Son of God at the crucifixion is that he wants to anchor Jesus’s divine sonship at least as early as his birth, then why does he later associate that same divine sonship AND innocence with Jesus’s death and resurrection in Acts 13? Luke is combining a variety of early traditions that are at odds at WHEN it happened in order to stress that he really WAS the Son of God. (Similar problem in Luke-Acts with other titles for Jesus as well: Christ and Lord. He gets *made* those at the resurrection but is *already* those before he dies!) RESPONSE Yes indeed! It’s one of the major questions to be addressed about Luke’s Christology. Why does he state that Jesus became Son of God at his conception (1:35); at his baptism (3:21 – that’s the wording of the original text, probably); and at his resurrection (speeches in Acts). I deal with the issue in Orthodox Corruption in my discussion […]
May 12, 2026
Blog Dinner in Waynesville NC, May 19. Wanna Come?
I’ll be in Waynesville NC next week and would love to have a blog dinner with anyone who can make it, on the evening of Tuesday May 19. Interested?
May 8, 2026
Christianity: A Weirdly Exclusivist Religion
In my previous post dealing with how Christianity managed to take over the Roman empire, I stressed its two highly unusual (and therefore — to outsiders — weird) aspects that in tandem ended up more or less destroying all the other religions: their stress on evangelism and their insistence on exclusivity. It’s not that every Christian evangelized or that all Christians completely gave up all their other religious traditions, but enough did that it led to the Christianization of the West. Here I want to explain a bit more about how the virtually unparalleled exclusivity worked, again drawing on my book The Triumph of Christianity (Simon & Schuster). ****************************** One way to understand Christian exclusivity is to think about the Christians’ unusual approach to “choice.” Of course everyone in the ancient world had to choose how to live, what to think, how to behave, and how to worship. In fact, pagan religions in recent scholarship have been portrayed as a kind of “marketplace,” where “shoppers” would choose among competing options. Just as you might choose to […]
May 13, 2026
Do You Know The Golden Ass? (Is a Mystery Religion like Christianity?)
In this post I have the pleasure of discussing one of my all time favorite ancient works of fiction, very funny and quite bawdy, but also showing us an important facet of ancient pagan religion in one of the Mystery Religions. It was written by an important second-century CE author named Apuleius and is sometimes called Metamorphoses but is more commonly known as The Golden Ass. Here is how I talk about it in The Triumph of Christianity (Simon & Schuster). ****************************** The Golden Ass is a hilarious tale, filled with joyous and rather raucous sex, nocturnal magical rites, murderous plots, wild escapades, narrow escapes, and, as it turns out,
May 14, 2026
How Did Christianity Succeed? An Older View That Many People Still Have
In my earlier posts I tried to show that the two key factors in the success of Christianity in taking over the Roman world were that Christians (well some/lots of them), unlike everyone else in their world, were eagerly trying to make converts and insisted that anyone who accepted their religious beliefs and following their religious practices had to abandon the views/practices they had always had. That’s not the view that scholars long held; and it’s striking to me that — unlike some other areas of historical study — the older view still seems to be widely accepted for those who think it is just “common sense.” Here is how I talk about it in my book The Triumph of Christianity (Simon & Schuster, 2018). ****************************** Older scholarship was virtually unified on the question of why Christianity succeeded. It filled the spiritual vacuum created by the collapse of paganism, which fell under its own weight. At this point in antiquity, the view held, no one could any longer believe the ridiculous myths of the pagans or […]
May 16, 2026
What an Ancient Enemy of Christianity Said About Why It Was Successful
On very rare occasions, pagan opponents of Christianity during the first three centuries commented on the movement, and in one case at least, explain why it was having some success in converting people. Here is what I say about it in Triumph of Christianity (Simon & Schuster, 2018), lightly edited here. ****************************** The first extensive discussion of the Christian movement from a non-Christian source (not disinterested, of course!) comes from the end of the 170s. We do not have this source as a stand-alone document. It is a book quoted, instead, by a Christian author, the great theologian Origen of Alexandria, who cited it precisely in order to refute it. The book had been written by an otherwise unknown pagan intellectual named
May 17, 2026
A Modern “Common Sense” About What Made Christianity Attractive to Converts
I have pretty clear ideas about what it was about Christianity that made pagans want to convert to the faith, so that over the course of 300 years Christianity went from something like 20 people who believed Christ’s death is the only thing that could bring salvation (right after his immediate disciples came to think he had been raised from the dead) to some 5,000,000 around the time Constantine joined the church. But most people find my views (I’ll restate/explain them in a later post) a bit hard to believe (OK: reminder/foreshadowing: Miracles!) (really??) (yup! I’ll explain). There are other views that seem easier to digest, and one that has been very popular over the past years and decades continues to seem commonsensical to people today: once people learned how amazing it was to belong to a Christian community, they too wanted to join up. I’ll admit, on the surface, it sure seems to make sense. But … Here is how I discuss it in Triumph of Christianity (Simon & Schuster, 2018). ****************************** It is often thought […]
May 19, 2026
Superior Health Care as an Explanation for the Spread of Christianity?
One modern explanation for why Christianity overcame all the pagan religions of the Roman world is that it provided better health care than anyone else, leading to its greater survival rate. I have to admit, when I first read about this, I thought “Whoa! Never heard THAT one before!” It’s an intriguing thesis and, I think, almost certainly wrong. But intriguing nonetheless! Here’s what I say about it in Triumph of Christianity (Simon & Schuster, 2018), briefly edited for our purposes here. ****************************** One benefit of joining the church recently touted as particularly important for Christian growth was the availability of better health care. This was one of the many controversial proposals set forth by sociologist of modern religion Rodney Stark, in his popular discussion, The Rise of Christianity,[1] Stark applies his sociological training to the question and makes some intriguing suggestions. He points out that
May 20, 2026
Why Christian Miracles Converted the Empire
Miracles. Who woulda thought…. In previous posts I’ve given some of the common explanations people given to explain how Christianity ended up taking over the Roman world, all of which seem plausible (Christians attracted people because of their community life, better health care, etc) but, in my view, not sufficiently supported by the existing evidence. I’ve also I’ve indicated that I have a decided view of the matter: that it was because of Christian “miracles.” That seems a bit odd for an atheist to argue, but, well, hear me out. Here I begin to explain it (this will take a couple of posts). All this is taken, with minor edits, from my book Triumph of Christianity (Simon and Schuster, 2018), which makes the full case. I begin with the paragraph that ended my previous post. ****************************** The best place to look for actual evidence of why Christianity succeeded are the actual accounts of conversions from the early church. These are relatively abundant and scattered throughout the decades and centuries with which we are concerned. Moreover, these […]
May 21, 2026
How Could Christian Miracles Convert the Empire if Miracles Don’t Happen?
I’ve been arguing that Christians eventually converted the Roman empire because of their great miracles. But, well, I’m an atheist and I don’t believe in miracles. So how exactly does that square up? How can miracles convert anyone if miracles don’t happen? Well, as it turns out, it absolutely can happen (and it doesn’t take a miracle!) Before continuing on to demonstrate the centrality of miracles to the Christian take-over of the Roman world, I pause here for some reflection on how it works…. Again this is from my book Triumph of Christianity (Simon & Schuster, 2018), slightly edited. ****************************** How are we to credit the Christian stories of miraculous conversions? Anyone who wants to accept these stories at face value will say they happened. But what about anyone else? Anyone, say, who doesn’t believe in miracles? We are confronted with three inescapable facts, all of which need to be accounted for. First,
May 23, 2026
And the Miracles Just Keep on Comin’
More on conversions coming from miracle stories — as reported by Christians, in their later legendary tales. You might object (or probably will object) that if these tales are legendary, they don’t show how people actually converted. My point is not that these relate real events, but they show how Christians (the story tellers and authors) understood how/why people converted, and it is striking that in virtually every case, it is precisely because of miracles, not other things. (In my next post I’ll talk about tales connected with actual historical figures). Again, this is from my book Triumph of Christianity. ****************************** Once we move outside the New Testament the tales of conversion-inducing miracles continue. Few are more intriguing than the conversion of the entire city of Edessa in Syria, allegedly because of miracles worked by Jesus’ follower Thaddaeus. In no small part the tale intrigues because it starts with Jesus himself, before his death, and a personal letter he sent to the king of Edessa, Abgar, in response to the king’s written request to be healed […]
May 24, 2026
These Are Weird Parables. Do They Make Sense?
There are passages of the New Testament that I’ve always found puzzling and have left it at that – not digging in deep in order to try to understand them. That may be kinda weird for a NT scholar, but it is just as common as it is weird. Some of these puzzlers involve the parables of Jesus. Recently I’ve decided to put in the brain work to figure them out, and I have – to my own satisfaction, at least. And hey, who else do I need to satisfy? Here are two examples. I have long thought neither of these parables made sense, and I’ve thought that whatever sense they made, they sure seemed to stand at odds with one another. Both are found only in the Gospel of the Luke, the Gospel most concerned to portray Jesus’ views on wealth and money, and both are in fact about money:
June 4, 2026
Biographical Accounts of Early Christian Miracles (Based on Eyewitnesses!)
Miracles convert! Whether they happen or not. That’s been my thesis in this thread. And now I keep piling on the evidence. (See my book Triumph of Christianity. [Simon and Schuster]) In addition to such legendary tales of apostolic adventures, we have two narratives from the early centuries that describe missionary activities of later evangelists, one active in the third Christian century and one in the fourth. Even though these are presented as ostensibly historical accounts, they more easily align themselves with “tales of a holy person” known as “hagiography” – a highly pious and legendary kind of writing that celebrates the miraculous deeds of a Christian saint. The Life of Gregory the Wonderworker The third-century figure of Gregory “Thaumaturgus,” that is, the “Wonderworker,” is known to us from a biographical sketch produced over a century after his death by a namesake, Gregory of Nyssa (335-394 CE). Gregory of Nyssa was a major theologian in the Christian church, most famous for his contributions to the ongoing discussions centered on the doctrine of the Trinity. His narrative […]
May 26, 2026